Microsoft has made several gestures of goodwill towards the Linux community recently. They would like for us all to forget their past of loathing Linux, and fighting Linux tooth and nail pretty much to keep it off PCs.

What would YOU like to see Microsoft do, in order for them to prove that their new found love for Linux isn't just a sham to make money? What compatibility do they need to create to bridge the gaps to the Linux world (instead of ruthlessly creating gaps)?

Here's what I'd need to see, at least, to believe Microsoft:
All currently-supported versions of Windows (starting with Windows 10, and then working backwards to Windows 7) must fully support BTRFS (as a “first-class” filesystem, which just works “plug-and-play”), because BTRFS fully supports NTFS-style ACL’s, after all. That is to say, when I plug in a USB stick, or external hard drive, formatted with BTRFS, Windows should open it (with full read-write access, creating no filesystem errors, allowing clean "Safe Removal"), and use ACL's in the same way as if I plugged the same thing in, NTFS-formatted.

I don't care how 'Microsoft' feels about 'Linux'. But on a practical level, I would welcome anything that makes it easier and more reliable (in the case of dual boot) to install Linux-based OSes on computers that were built with Windows in mind. In other words, don't try to lock in my hardware, and don't try to monkey up people's installations if they have chosen to dual boot.

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Microsoft can and regularly does make our lives hell (though various breakages in compatibility), so I think we need to care at least that much.

For example, Microsoft invented UEFI, then aggressively pushed all motherboard manufacturers to support it, then require it.

UEFI has been a major thorn in the side of the linux community for a long, long time. How long did it take for all the major distros to have good UEFI support? Like a decade?

Another big example: Microsoft also invented ACPI (when APM support in Linux had a far better chance of getting all sorted out cleanly), which is something that Linux distros have struggled like forever to support well (and this is still ongoing, and is far from sorted out for all the mobo types, and other related hardware, out there).

An interesting question. Microsoft undoubtedly only loves Linux for clouds and servers, not as a competing OS for consumer devices. So whether their love for Linux is genuine or not, it's a bit moot for us here right? I think they will be doing little of immediate use for us here.

Paranoid tinfoil hatted rubbish, nas ignorant as always. MS has been one of the biggest corporate contirbutors to the kernel project for YEARS. Why does Mint atttract so many conspicacy nuts???

This is demonstrable false and untrue. Don't be boorish; check your facts and be civil.

The (roughly) yearly kernel development reports from the Linux Foundation have a chapter on who is sponsoring the work. While Microsoft made about 1% of the changes around 2012 [2], both before and after [1,3,4,5,6] they have not made it into the top 30 or warranted any mention. Microsoft's work on the Linux kernel around 2012 was almost exclusively to add kernel drivers for its Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor [7].

The top contributors are pretty much who you'd expect. Companies like Intel, Red Hat, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD... Not Microsoft, except for their Hyper-V driver work around 2012.

Sources:

"Linux Kernel Development — How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It"

M$ saves $$$$ by using free Linux for her Azure and One Drive Cloud Data-servers, as do Google, Intel, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

M$ has been doing everything in her power to prevent free Linux from displacing non-free Windows in the desktop OS market. Some OEMs have even colluded with M$ in her anti-Linux efforts, eg the proprietary Intel RST RAID-disk driver and Intel Optane RAM/memory; and from 2020 onward, all new Intel processors will only support UEFI, ie no more Legacy BIOS.

Well if M$ behaved logically for once it would drop the hindrances to alternative OS's once it reaches the cloud platform nirvana it's currently striving for, after all since it wont be a desktop OS anymore why would it want to hinder what "used" to be it's rivals? Of course it wont though because it throw away long term logic thinking years ago.... or it's completely logical and there's another agenda we can only speculate on.

The proof I'd like to see is that they fix their updates so that they do NOT destroy Linux partitions .. and if it does happen, THEY pay for (or even provide*) forensic data recovery services, which as anyone who has looked into will know, is rather expensive.